Neo-Proudhonian Mutualism.—Between Contr'archy and Guarantism.—The Multiplication of Free Forces is the True Contr'un.

Monday, May 19, 2008

And then I stumbled upon...

There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like "Philosophical Pamphlets," or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines.

This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn't done it in a while and who knows...?), I ran across a volume called, you guessed it, Philosophical Pamphlets, which contained another digital copy of Henry Cohen's edition of William B. Greene's 1870 Mutual Banking. The full contents are these:

There's some good stuff here, not least The Financial Problem, which has been one of the last real holes in my collection of Westrup's work. Several of the others are publications of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, including the Pentecost piece, which is specifically titled "The Anarchistic Method," and originally appeared, if I remember correctly, in The Twentieth Century during Pentecost's tenure as editor. The library record actually attributed, or seemed to attribute the eighth pamphlet to Herbert Spencer, but when I looked at the title I realized that it was actually a scarce pamphlet by Charles T. Fowler. Fowler is one of the few figures generally associated with mutualism that I have note yet been able to read at all. As it turns out, the ninth and tenth works are also from Fowler's paper, The Sun. I will transcribe all of these to the Libertarian Labyrinth archive as soon as possible, but in the meantime, check them out at the Internet Archive.